Vanishing Act
by coeur de lyon
Summary: A story in snippets. Neji, Tenten, and the way things fall apart. Discontinued, just so you know.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** First chapter. Whoop whoop. This story isn't chronological, so… yeah. That's why it's in (_bits_). It's good to get yer brain juices flowing like that, I reckon. Fairly angsty psychobabbly story, but what the hey. I'm just random like that. I started this as a one-shot then realised I could use it to hammer out a random storyline that plays in my head, and thus, Vanishing Act became the multi-chapter wonder you see before you. Okay. I'm done blowing my own horn now lol.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own the rights. Nor will I ever. Fanfiction is for fun not cash.

**_Vanishing Act_**

Chapter I

_Gare de Lyon_

(_Requiem_)

They had been here before, but not like this. The stone stands there, ghastly in the reflected light, and she is so sharp and jagged that he is in danger of being cut by her; but there is nothing else he can do.

The world is ending.

(_Airborn_)

It's winter, and the winds are tearing through Konoha. Autumnal leaf litter swirls through the streets, clogging gutters and drains in mouldering piles, and she watches him from the corners of her eyes.

His hair is long and windtossed, blowing over his fair skin like snow and bare branches, and he's unquestionably the most beautiful boy she's ever seen. Hyuga Neji. With his sinuous, predatory grace, and his unmarred icy skin and the smiles that flicker briefly at the corners of his mouth, if she pays enough attention.

With his eyes so clear and deep that, sometimes, (on bad days)

She considers drowning herself in them.

Once the clouds pass though, she just feels foolish, for thinking anything so stupid and dangerous and melodramatic, and the only way Tenten knows how to deal with her unwanted feelings is to train until her body is on fire and fatigue blocks out whatever else she's experiencing, but when she turns fifteen, the grey days outnumber the clear ones.

Everyone is ridiculously impressed by how much she improves at that time, and Godaime herself commends her, and Neji tells her that if she'd gotten her act together earlier, she would have beaten Temari in the chunin exams, and when he tells her that, she screws up her nose, and tells him that she knows. Instead of trying to explain she was happy then.

She can't pinpoint the how or the why of it, the way the world inexplicably dissolved out from under her; so she doesn't try to.

Besides, she _is_ treading water again, has stopped sinking, mostly, even _if_ the golden place she was (not even a year ago) is still far away. When she dreams about drowning though, her heart beats too fast and she sometimes forgets to breathe, and the fact that he has such a devastating effect on her is terrifying and unfathomable. So (almost) imperceptibly, she stops meeting his eyes. Begins to nurture a separation between them, not yet realising the brutal power that corrosion can have. Add to that.

He hurts. She can feel it radiating from him sometimes, but she's a shinobi, and self-preservation is part of the deal, and she needs to…preserve, and so will he. Persevere.

(_Akinetics _)

I once read somewhere that the stars we see at night are sometimes already dead. This is what I want to tell her.

She's on watch, and she's looking out at the sky, and it should be dark, but it isn't, not yet. We're close to the town, and the light pollution, coupled with the clouds, has sealed us into a strange half-lit limbo, neither day or night, and she's volunteered herself for watch, because of this undarkness.

Tenten doesn't, or can't sleep, unless it's properly dark, and too black for any of us but me to see anything; and we've been a team long enough now to not even bother asking her anymore. So she sits beyond our bivouac with a blanket wrapped across her back and could almost pass for a stone. And though I have the daybreak watch, and will, if we fight, have to spend tomorrow covering her more than usual, I'm still awake too.

I want to tell her that I read somewhere that, in certain places, the light pollution has disrupted the patterns of migratory birds, which is sad, and horrifying; that we could impact upon the most ancient patterns of the world so heavily. They fly distressed into buildings, instead of making their way to the colder regions of the world; fall out of the sky. Bees are disappearing too, in some places, and they're so integral to the systems we take for granted that some people believe the world is going to end, and soon.

Sometimes she forgets that we're here at all.

It's dangerous, especially when we're fighting. When she gets sidetracked into thinking she's alone, and needs to take on all our opponents by herself. It saps away her very _lifeforce_, and she crumples to the ground afterwards, and has to be carried back to the village, or to safety.

That isn't a particularly strenuous job on our part though. The reason Tenten flies so _high_ in her jutsu is because she can, so easily. She's lighter, by far, than the weights Gai-sensei makes us train with; light enough that sometimes, and though I'd never say as much to her, I think she's on the verge of dissolving out of my very arms.

She's done that, now, forgotten us; dramatically removed from our shelter, with a blanket across her back, looking ridiculously vulnerable. In battle, it's _good_ that she's so underestimated, but out of it, and especially when she's stopped speaking, she seems so delicate and fragile and small… as though to touch her, she'd shatter.

I want to touch her now, to reassure myself that she is still here, and made of skin and blood and bone, but the space between us is measureless, and if I reach out, I don't know how far I'll fall, if I can't reach her. And the cynic in me wonders what's new?

Tenten isn't from Konoha. We've all known this forever, because there are only so many secrets one village can take, and the child that a chunin brought back with him on the way back from a mission isn't one of them. So when her sometimes strangeness emerges from the depths, when her wildness or her silence or her emptiness takes her away from everything, it's written off (always) as 'a forest thing'. God alone knows what she is or was, those first four years of her life; but the man (he's dead now. One of our old instructors) who found her, found her in the wilderness of the deep forest, unquestionably alone, and this means she's allowed such idiosynchracies. So when she slips away, exists somewhere beyond what we know, it's unspoken between Lee and Gai-sensei and I to just let her be. Hope she comes back to us when it passes.

No one is talking to her now, not even me. I read information that says we're flying straight into the apocalypse, and I want to talk to her about it because her instinct is always to run, and she's gotten us out of more than one situation by trusting her gut, and I want to see what she says we should do, and so I tell myself that it's so easy to reach out and tap her on the shoulder and ask her, but part of me is afraid. What if she _does_ dissolve? Disappear? Float away like a skeleton leaf? Can I take that chance?

Of all the stars in the sky, only one doesn't move. The North Star. It shines and shows us the way, an omnipresent guide. There are of course other ways to find your way if you're lost; by calculations that divide the zenith of the night sky into slivers and ribbons of statistics, but the North Star is what you look for, first.

Some stars are already dead, I want to say. Has anyone figured out if the North Star might one day flicker out? What will happen to us then? Our hub, the way we've been not lost on so many missions… and when Gai-sensei leaves us in the wilderness and my chakra is used up and we have to make it back to Konoha? And when she runs away and I find her asleep in the starlight? What then?

People say the world is going to end and (I'm losing everything, and) the stars could be dead, and the birds are dying and the bees are disappearing and (so is she. And) I watch her watch the unlit sky, and all I want to do is touch her, and ask her.

_Tenten, what will we do?_

(_Manifest_)

Some days, Tenten stops talking, steps out of reality, curls up inside of herself, and watches life as if from far away…

People notice, just not long enough to wonder, and mostly she can pretend to be a ghost, and her solitude is a relief. Like diving underwater, with her eyes wide open.

Eventually she breaks the spell; answers her sensei, or says thank you, when someone holds a door open for her, but in that secret place, wrapped in her silence, just to see how much she impacts upon the world, she draws some fitting conclusions.

It fits, for instance, that she leaves barely an impression upon the skeleton leaves, because she isn't properly from Konoha anyway.

She'll fight for Godaime of course, and she'll most likely die for this village, but if not for the fact that she's become too good to go down so quick, she epitomises 'cannon fodder'. When she dies, unlike her comrades, or her enemies, there will be no compensation paid to grieving relatives, and probably not much of a funeral; not if she dies in a mission, and is burned with the secrets of the village-that-isn't-hers in some lonely corner of the world that has long since forgotten its name (if it had one at all). Hers will be carved into the memorial stone, along with something inconsequential about her age and rank and then she will be forgotten in perfect turn.

And this is fine. She has no birthday to celebrate, so why should she have a death to mourn? And this is why, when she rocks up tight, and no words tremble unspoken on her lips, it's almost like practice.

(_in_)

When Tenten breaks, she explodes (and it's almost a relief).

She is standing there, and he hasn't met her eyes in the longest time but he recognises that he has to, that this is the brink, the breaking point, and that if he doesn't he is going to lose her too; and that he is going to hurt, he reminds himself, is inevitable anyway.

When he meets her eyes though, the detonation nearly drowns him, and while he forces his body to function, forces himself to keep breathing, he can't help but be pulled under by her, down into her inverted forest.

Everything is a struggle there, everything is a threat. Everything is all or nothing, and the absolution is terrifying, and he forces his way through it, through the shapeless nameless horrors that are plaguing her, have been eating her ever since she stopped meeting his eyes, ever since he stopped looking at her, ever since the mission went so horribly horribly wrong, and holds her in his arms, fearfully and tenderly, and tries to beat that darkness back.

He feels her heart beating wildly beneath her skin, and knows she is afraid, but she doesn't fight him when he holds her, even if she doesn't hold him back.

(_forgetting_)

She is older now, and sometimes she thinks she might almost be okay, sometimes even has the audacity to hope that she might be rising through the water, but then life throws a calamity at her, one that makes her slip again. Like the day she forgets her name.

Not the one she was given, before she started speaking to them, when she was four.

The other one, inside, that she's always had and never told. The one that is a random sound, more than anything else, which used to ebb and flow through her, like the tide.

It happens in a rush. One moment she is training, sparring with Neji, bombarding him with weapons and about to break through his guard and her victory is so close she can almost taste it – and then he unleashes a _new_ trick, whirling all her arsenal back at her and sending her flying backwards across the training ground to slam into a tree.

_Oh snap. Get up_ – she thinks and then freezes.

Her name. What's her _name_?

And she is taking too long because Neji is coming over to her and is frowning and his feet, if she chanced to look, are all she can see of him from here, if she weren't looking elsewhere right now, desperately.

_Get up._

"Can you keep on?"

It isn't really a question, and there's a scream building in her throat and her history is slipping like water through her hands and if she speaks then she'll never find her way home again.

"Tenten?"

_A little lighter, a little more… _

He kneels down and he looks into her eyes and she freezes.

A little less

"I'm fine." She gets up, and the lie makes her dizzy, and she stumbles, and he grabs her, one arm snagging her waist to keep her from hitting the ground again and

"Did I hurt you? Why are you – are you crying?" says Neji and she brings a hand to her cheek and feels jagged water coursing over her skin and he goes to touch her tears (and they are all she has left) and she slaps his hands away and, startled, he releases her.

She sways on her feet, her chakra has nearly gone, and she summons what she has left to spit out her next words, the only ammo she has left. "Don't. Touch. Me." And the way his eyes widen makes her sink a little.

Moorless, she does the one thing she can.

(_Pacis_)

There is nothing he can say to stop this, so he stops trying. Just holds her, feels the bones of her shoulder blades pressing against his arms like wings, the feel of her heart through her back through his hand, the heady relief that she can't dissolve when he's holding her. He presses his forehead to hers and he inhales the rosemary fragrance of her and she flinches.

"Goddamnit Neji." She whispers, and her brow is hard and her voice is soft and he holds her close, breathing her in. "I just want to stop hurting is all…"

"We all – " he tries, gently.

"I know. I _know_ that everyone hurts, but I…" her eyes are wide and cast down, looking into some darkness his clan eyes will never be able to comprehend. "I made the _world_ stop turning, Neji."

And he is afraid, because he only sort of understands, and that she is standing on the precipice of despair makes him touch her cheek, and her honey coloured eyes flicker up to his and they scare him. "And do you know what happens to you when the world stops turning Neji? Would you believe?"

So he says "Don't do this Tenten…" and she isn't listening and it makes him so afraid. "Please don't go again Tenten." As if begging something so simple will be enough to stop her from disappearing into the forest, deeper than he will ever be able to find her.

"I'm sorry Neji…" as if she is already gone, as if she is already going. "Forgive me, Neji. I – I made the world stop, Neji and I – and I k – " and because he can't bear the words pouring from her mouth he tries to stop them forming, tries to press his hand to her lips to keep it all bottled in, but it's too little, and so he tries, instead, to kiss it better, and the taste of her wildness and her despair makes him ache with it too.

"Forgive me," she begs, voice cracking with a sob, clinging onto him as though she's drowning.

"Forgive me or else I'll disappear."

_There's nothing to forgive,_

The lie makes him dizzy and when she holds him it's all he can do to stay standing, arms wrapped around her shoulders like a shield, begging her not to cry, that everything will be fine, that she is safe, isn't going anywhere because he is here and he won't let her, and a million other promises he would die to keep. The girl he thought he knew shattered in front of him, and the fact that she is so terribly afraid underneath is more than enough to keep her holding onto him, in the way he has always held her.

"There's blood on my hands…" she whispers, and, god, how he knows it.

Forgiveness is for another day.

(_flying_)

They get a mission on one of the beautiful days. One of the days that Tenten wakes up and is actually glad to be alive, and the whole world, by the time training (which is so smooth she could sing) is over, is still bathed in the warm golden veils of light that soak golden feelings right into her soul, so that when Gai-sensei finishes explaining the mission (B-Rank, which will give her enough cash to have her weapons painstakingly polished and sharpened and wrapped, complimentarily, in blue silk) and settles back in his stool, asking them "What's new?"

She says "I'm 17 next week," and sips at her tea like she hasn't dropped a bombshell, instead of saying _Nothing_, the way she usually does.

"But…Tenten," says Neji, and (when he isn't looking) he is frowning gently when she looks at him. "You weren't…"

"Found til I was four, I know. But that was then, and medical technology has caught up, and Godaime is 90 percent certain my birthday is in April. The tenth in fact, or possibly the eleventh. But I think the tenth is going to be nicer weather."

"I'm glad Tenten!" says Lee, immediately starting a list of who to invite and what to cook and how to cook it and where to have it, and Gai, misty eyed, murmurs something about it being so beautiful, having his students moving into the springtime of their lives, able to finally revel in their youth, and she has to agree.

There is heartache ahead, and life and love and loss; but that will be later. Tenten and Neji slip from the tea house, leaving Gai and Lee behind, and she calls after him, when they split ways, headed for home.

"You'll come, won't you?"

Neji looks at her for a long time, and she looks back, and there is something in his gaze that makes a bolt of recognition flash through her. She has forgotten how to read his silver eyes, but she sees, still, the moment when he decides to answer her. "Even if the weather's bad." And it's enough for now.

She smiles.

Walking through Konoha, it feels as though she is anchored there, rocked by the same force that keeps the world turning, the Nakano flowing out to sea, and the leaves falling from the trees.

_Things are going to change_ thinks Tenten and belongs.

/End Chapter... Cheers for reading


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Hum. Chapter 2. Onward we go :D

**Disclaimer:** If I owned it, believe you me, I wouldn't be writing fanfiction for it. And the whole thing would probably be called Neji or Tenten instead ;)

**_Vanishing Act_**

Chapter II

_Gare de Lyon_

(_nox_)

Life is cruel and beautiful and so terribly fleeting that sometimes he wants to tear out his hair in grief, once it sets in. For a week they float in a sort of coma, blanketed by shock, and their missions are put on hold. He goes to the training ground to try and do something, unable to stand the sympathy everyone sends his way, even worse than when his dreams were destroyed, and runs around the village, eyes blind to the sun rising and setting, counting in his head. Sometimes they come too, run with him, further, and sometimes they beg him to stop, but Neji and Tenten don't matter at the moment, and the chunin guarding the walls don't matter at the moment and the village doesn't matter at the moment and all that matters is that he keeps running, because if he does, then he can fix this.

Neji finds her watching him, apart from the crowd of spectators, and when she looks up at him, he catches up to Lee.

"Lee…please."

The lone green beast slows down, turning to him, eyes wild and wide and despairing, and it hurts to look at him. He is used to Tenten being this way, but seeing it in Lee cuts him in a way he never thought it could.

"I never did finish my laps, did you know?" he says, almost conversationally. "Always had to shift to another task, but I figured it out this time, Neji. I figured it out. Do you know how?"

And then they're around the village again, and Tenten is still sitting there, curled up, arms bare despite the bite of the autumning air, and then they curve around the walls again and she is gone.

"It's like this: I have to keep running, Neji. I set limits, bounded by time, and that's why I never ever finished, and this time I'm going to keep going Neji, I'm just going to keep going until I get there, till I've done this a million times."

And Neji falters and Lee turns, jogging on the spot. "C'mon Neji! I'm nearly at six thousand!" and Neji grabs his hand, and Lee begins to run again. "Please Lee, it's impossible!" And they're nearing her again and Lee angrily swings him away and he goes flying, caught off balance by the strength and anger in the movement, and when he touches the ground he skids across the earth to a halt and Lee keeps running, calling out angrily over his shoulder. "That's your _problem_ Neji. You _always_ focus on the bars," and then he is gone.

For two days Lee draws a crowd of morbid, avid spectators, and then only Neji and Tenten remain. Waiting. When his pace begins to falter, until even a baby could outrun him, they rise.

All in all, Rock Lee runs for four days, twenty three hours and eleven minutes. And then he blacks out, folding to the ground like a sigh, dead to the world, but still breathing.

When he wakes up, Tenten is cradling his head in her lap, and there are tears in her eyes, and when she begins to say something he wriggles away from her.

And they cease to be who they were.

(_trepidation_)

There are wanted posters up all over the walls in this part of Hokage Tower, where missions are received and pay collected, and they're standing in the corridor, idly waiting for team seven who were ahead of them to trot out with fuller pockets, and it is then that she sees his picture on the wall.

The image makes adrenalin course through her body and she sits down to keep the world from spinning out of control, and

"What's the matter?" Neji asks her, still standing, eyes sliding over to her only for a second (she doesn't talk to him anymore) before scrutinising the pictures of nukenin that dot the walls again, dreaming of a time when they aren't green behind the ears chunin anymore, and able to be heroes.

She closes her eyes, leans her head against the comfortingly solid green vinyl of the chair back and breathes in and out deeply, feeling her lungs inflate with the air that keeps her alert and awake and alive.

"I'm tired," she tells him and Lee shakes his head sorrowfully.

"You should get more rest, Tenten." He tells her, and he comes over, indicates the crescents under her eyes. "'Fatigue in a ninja costs lives,'" and she knows he cares, from the gentleness in his eyes, even if it is undermined by the Gaiism he's worked into the sentence, making their sensei look up from the magazine he's reading, approval in his eyes.

"Listen to your teammate, Tenten. Go to bed earlier. Your dedication these last few months is commendable, but you shouldn't sacrifice your well-being to train through the night."

She nods, fobbing him off. "Alright Gai-sensei, I will." And she hears Neji's quickly repressed snort and something about it grates on her a bit.

So after they receive their mission (and they're going to Wind Country which is nice) she falls into step beside him and they walk for a while in silence. Eventually he asks her the burning question.

"What do you want?" and she looks up at him, sliding a tendril of hair out of her field of vision.

"Why did you snort?"

He regards her for a moment, staring at her that way that he does, and as usual, holding his gaze feels like she's being punched in the stomach, but she doesn't let it go. And then he says "I don't think you'll like the answer."

It's not the answer she would ever have expected and she frowns. They've stopped now, just standing on some faceless street, neither here nor there.

"When did liking something ever become a factor?" And he scowls and the wind blows his hair into his face, and he shakes it free, in that way that he does, which is perhaps the single most graceful gesture she has ever seen; that strangely elegant flick that she wishes she could do.

_Ever since I started to care_ is the answer he wants to give her.

"Because I don't think you meant what you said to Gai-sensei." He says finally. She fiddles with the button at her throat and her silence says more than her words ever would, so he walks away, over it.

(_recovery_)

_Who was she? Who could she have been? A jinnchuuriki sent to infiltrate the village. A honey-coloured changeling child, holding the future in her starfish hands. A baby, pillowed on soft dead leaves. Blown out of the forest and onto the road. The Konoha Road. She couldn't answer his questions (What was she doing there? Could she understand him? Was she alright?)._

_So he sighed, and picked her up._

_She was light. As insubstantial as a dandylion seed. And when he began to move she curled into his body. No fear in her wide, honey coloured eyes. _

_Nothing else, though, either. _

_When he took her to the orphanage, competent civilian women took over, clucked over the lice in her hair, and the ring of dirt around her waist (she had no shirt, just a fine coating of forest earth tinging her skin a deeper, more ochre brown, staining the waistband of her pants) and she had, as it turned out, when a medic-nin was summoned to examine her, worms._

_Learning all this (because he'd yet to leave) was nearly enough to make him regret bringing her here, touching her at all, but then something in her honey coloured eyes would flicker, and he would feel compelled to stay. Watch her. Be by her._

_Linger._

(_reflection_)

When Gai-sensei teaches her exploding tags she has a moment of such sublime clarity – nirvana – that she has to say to herself, for a moment _Breathe, Kayo_. Neji watches her, the way her pupils have dilated, and smirks. _Those who slip in and out of heaven_, he thinks and rolls his eyes. Exploding seals are good to know, because knowledge makes you stronger, but it loses its lustre when everything is predetermined anyway. And besides, exploding tags don't pertain to his style at all, and mostly, he mourns the time he's wasting by being a part of this cosy little training session.

Tenten though, shivers audibly when she releases that first tag, churning a crater in the earth as wide as Neji's not-so gentle fists, and the feel of the explosion seems to shudder in that empty space under her sternum, reverberating through the chambers of her heart.

Then Gai-sensei claps her on the shoulder and the feeling dissolves as she looks up at his face, at his sloe-black eyes. "It appears you have an aptitude for ballistics, Tenten-chan." He says, flicking her a thumbs up, and she doesn't know what to say, knowing only that if she tells the truth their reality will cut her to bits. That it feels familiar is something she knows will be crushed by their sympathy, and she'd rather hold onto it as long as she can.

It's been 8 years now, and she's a shinobi and the sort of sense she has of being someone else is fading enough as it is. She has a memory, for instance, of being seven years old in the playground at the academy and watching the wind caress the tops of the trees, and _knowing_ that it was going to rain, despite the clear blue sky.

Looking back, she can't understand it, the certainty she felt then (and the fact that her prediction held true), and it makes her feel a bit woozy, in reflection. As though she's not altogether here, and the fact that she is older now, and has lost that sense, that gift she can barely remember, sometimes makes her feel sick. She feels a bit ill now, releasing seals that gut the earth, but it's different doing this. Churny with energy. As though, if she really wanted to, she'd be able to fly.

When training is over, and Lee and Gai-sensei have gone for an impossible-to-complete run and the training yard is pockmarked all over, she goes up to the edge of that first crater and stares into it. It's the biggest one, the messiest, before she got the hang of it, the surgical precision she needed to contain the force of her chakra, which shows in the later holes, but the rawness of this first one is almost poetic.

She stares at it, and remembers to breathe, and inhales the sweet smell of hot earth and the bitter smoke and it makes her feel whole in the weirdest way. Her lungs fill with the scent and solace rocks her. _If it rains, it'll fill with water_ she thinks, but she has no way (now) to tell if that'll happen, not anymore. Nor why a pothole filling with rain would occur to her at all.

In all likelihood it will be filled with earth, tamped down by the next team who train here, and inexplicable sadness washes over her at the thought of this. She kneels down and rests her hand briefly against the churned up soil, and remembers knowing that the rain was coming.

_Breathe Kayo._

(_dissociate_)

He wants to pin it on that fact that she's a silly girl, her scatter-brainedness.

It isn't the first time she's been late meeting him, but stars have risen now, which shouldn't have, and so he shrugs back into his coat and stalks up from the training grounds through the village until he gets to her apartment building. Walking up the stairs he resolves to break down her door to scare her awake, or something equally as annoying – only to turn the corner to a door that gapes open.

Fear lodges in his belly like an ulcer. He activates his Byakugan. The doorway screams of wrongness, the creak it makes as he rests his hand on it, on the threshold of her space, is creepy, imbued with the foreboding of the night, and even before he has shifted his sight through the flat he knows she isn't there.

It takes him hours to find her, and it's luck more than anything else that he does at all. Luck that the night is frosty and the sky dusted brightly by stars, and that the light glimmers off the edge of her as he passes her, 2 miles away. When he gets to her, curled up on the forest floor, he doesn't have time to consider why she is there, sinking his vision into her chakra channels.

To make sure she's still alive.

And he's leaning over her, sinking his power into her body to see what's wrong and her eyes flicker open, and she's (thankfully) there. For a moment there's a yearning in her eyes that he doesn't understand, and she's a little girl, not a chunin and he remembers watching her stand at the academy gate, hugging one of the posts as though to save herself from being blown away. Then it's gone, like lightning, and she looks at him guiltily. "I'm sorry I didn't come to training," she says, in a voice still laced with sleep. "I forgot to breathe."

He doesn't ask her what she means, because he knows that her answer will only scare him more.

(_disclosure_)

"If I tell you a secret, would you tell anyone else about it?"

They're lying on the packed earth of the training ground, heads together, exhausted. The sun is filled with summer, and in the evening it still warms his skin, lying on the baked earthen floor.

"That is completely subjective," he says.

The sky is a deepening ocean of blue, beginning to tinge orange at it's edges, and it's always this sort of day (a warm one) at this sort of time (after training, when their bodies are thrumming with fatigue and the world is changing) that Tenten is most happy, most open. He doesn't think she realises just how the sorrow shines in her eyes sometimes, when she stops, lost in her thoughts, and he is grateful to whatever force out there makes her so open to elation, on red weather days.

She laughs, reaching up with a hand to cuff him gently 'for being prosy' and he closes his eyes to better bottle the sound, commit it to memory, and store it next to his soul. Sometimes she is the most alive person he knows, and just looking at her, or being by her (because, technically, he can't see her at the moment) makes him feel good, glad to be alive with her. She rolls over onto her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows, and the edges of her face (her nose and cheekbones and chin, resting on her hands) are turned to gold by the sunlight streaming out of the west. "Well…y'know how I was found? By someone on a mission?"

"Hn?"

"I went and asked Godaime, who it was." He opens his eyes, the maziness of the last half-hour replaced by her soft-voiced seriousness.

"And?" She goes still, and he tries to see more of her than just her gilded edges, but he can't move without her noticing, and moving will worry her, so he doesn't. She doesn't speak for another second, as though she regrets mentioning it at all, until

"It was Mizuki-sensei." She says, and he feels a chill crawl up his body.

Once he sought Naruto out for an answer to the red chakra, disbelieving the conclusions he'd come to himself. The boy had looked at him with his wide blue eyes and hidden nothing. The news of Mizuki's treason had rippled through the village, but never the circumstance, and he had wondered why, 'til he had heard the truth from Naruto himself. And the idea that it had been that man who'd taken her…

He rolls over onto his stomach, pillows his cheek on his folded arms, desperate to look at her, knowing he can't.

"Are you okay?" He feels her lift up the strap hanging down the side of his hitai-ate and twist it through her fingers.

"Yeah," she says, but there's a tightness to her voice, as if she wants to cry, and he wonders how much Godaime told her. "Just… he used to take me out sometimes, y'know? For dinner, when I was at the orphanage. He's the one that gave me that weapons rack in the corner of my room, as a graduation present. I thought it was normal, the sort of thing he did with everyone. How thick am I?" She tries to laugh.

"Tenten, you're not an idiot. If he didn't want you to know…"

"That's just it, though." Her hand, playing with the strap of his hitai-ate shakes, and she tightens it into a fist.

So he takes it, her hand, shaking in his own, pulling himself up cross-legged. She moves too, until they're both sitting, and he takes her other hand in his, and holds them to make the shaking subside.

"Don't kill yourself over this Tenten." He says, making sure his voice is firm and leaves no room for doubt, because if that leaks in, she'll be swamped. "If he didn't want you to know… he would have had his reasons. He used to take you out, right? Gave you your weapons rack?" she nods, eyes lowered to their hands. She usually shies away from physical contact, unless they're sparring, which is different, or she herself initiates it, and he is relieved that she hasn't broken away yet. "He wouldn't have done that if you didn't mean something to him."

The day is fading. There are a million holes in the picture of their former teacher as he has painted it, she knows. But she is grateful for the story, and her hands have stopped shaking, and his hands are so rough from training and his voice so carefully matter-of-fact that she holds onto him longer than she really needs to before letting go. Because he makes her want to believe him, and it has been a long time since she believed in something, so

"Thank you." Says Tenten, and for the first time in a long time, she breathes easy.

/End Chapter… Cheers for reading


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Sorry about the length…this one is short, because I couldn't figure out how to fix it up the way I wanted to.

And let's ignore the geographical inaccuracies, and the blatant LACK of canon and HUGE amount of speculation, and just...roll with it for now. At least the plot thickens up. A bit.

**Disclaimer:** Tch. Like I can afford to buy rights... I wonder though... do you reckon you could use Naruto rights as a down-payment on a house? That could be interesting...

**_Vanishing Act_**

Chapter III

_Gare de Lyon_

(_solaris_)

He has been away for a month on Family Business, and as they approach the gates of the village he feels a queasy combination of excitement and apprehension and worry and relief. It has only been five months since he made genin, and his team have occupied his thoughts the entire time he was away, and even when he was training - the way that Gai-sensei told him to - he was unable to shake them from his mind. Would Gai-sensei be pleased with his progress? Would he have caught up to Neji yet? Would Tenten still have that look in her eyes?

And then he sees them, the three people he loves, most in the world, and his cousin, walking with him, sees the way his pace picks up. His family are merchants, and his grandparents are the only two who live in Konoha at all, the rest of the family travelling through the world, and if he hadn't decided to go to the academy one afternoon, he would have joined them,

And Lee has never been so sure that that was the right decision for him in his entire life.

Neji is pale as ice and his arms are folded against the heat of the late spring afternoon, and even from this far away Lee can see the grin on Gai-sensei's face, and Tenten is waving and his cousin says "Who are they?" and Lee turns, and smiles.

"They're my teammates, my best friends, and I'm going to know them until the day I die."

(_remembrance_)

The market place is beautiful here. Wind Country is filled with nomads, who know the trails through the ever shifting sands by heart, and congregate here, every six months, or so Gaara had said, to sell their carpets and their jewellery and their camels and their heady fragrant treasures. Frankincense from the trees that grow in only one grove in the entire world, perfume from places that have names that fall clumsily from her mouth and make her heart beat more quickly, and they walk, she and her teammate, through the stalls under the sky as if in a dream.

Lee and Gai-sensei are gone to beg for camel rides and she and Neji stand poised on the threshold of a shady tent, because she saw something glitter, and stopped. She turns to him and the channels around his eyes stand out briefly against his skin.

"Weapons." He confirms and she stoops to enter the stall.

There, a man sits, welcomes them to sit with him, serves tea and chats enthusiastically, and they talk to him for what seems like only minutes, but from the disintegration of the light is obviously much longer, and Neji's eloquence carries them a long way. Soon enough the sword seller disappears briefly, while she runs her fingers over the beautiful carpet covered floor, to emerge with a box of mahogany wood, dark and old and wide, under his arm.

Heart in her mouth, Tenten watches as he opens it, watches the way he lifts the lid slowly, and knows her longing is written all over her face. In the box lies a beautifully decorated hilt, covering a curved knife that she recognises with an intake of breath.

"You know the Karambit?" the nomad asks and she nods. "Mmm…" he says, and he looks at her, eyes enigmatic and penetrating. "I have not been to the Tiger Lands in many years," and pulls the weapon from its sheath.

Sometimes when they were in the forest, it felt like she could…feel them there, those most dangerous predators, and Neji would confirm this, coughing lightly to show that they were human, standing still, eyes byakugan wide and fearful. That was all you needed to do, show them you were human. Allegedly.

To survive, shinobi must respect their terrain, and the dense, uncharted forests require unparalleled respect, born of terror and the awareness that, in that realm, shinobi are not the most devastatingly powerful creatures. Those that come back chuckle blackly from their hospital beds, talk about the heart of the darkness and try to pretend that their wounds could be worse, and only once had someone looked into that darkness, and come through unbroken (though far from unscathed) and the knife in the nomad's hand was that nameless person's legacy.

Kuku Macan.

The knife is shaped like a tiger's claw, all blue steel and lethally sharp edge and cruel curved over end, possessed with a beauty no kunai could ever hope to match and Tenten has been obsessed with the grace of martial arts since before she began to speak (when they first brought her to the village, she did not speak their language), when she used to watch shinobi train, bodies lithe and sinuous and destructive – and none more so than the hard-faced specialists who entered a state of grace on the bare earth, weapons extensions of their bodies, beautiful and deadly – and she _knows_ what art this man holds.

And he sees it in her too, and for the first time since they entered the shop he measures her in an almond green gaze.

"Do you know how to use it?"

"I've practiced with the ones in the Konoha collection."

"Do you know how to use it?" he repeats, and, heart thumping, she nods.

(_duration_)

When he wakes up, it's cold, and he can feel a cough lodged in his throat. So he clears it, and he feels Lee, at his back, stir. He turns, but his teammate lies still, sleeping.

The light that penetrates the dusty room through the gap between the curtains spreads itself in a golden bar over their tangled, blanket covered legs, and he closes his eyes again, wanting to melt into the mattress.

It doesn't work though. Inevitably, the sheet beneath his cheek is wet, dampened by someone's cold tears.

They hadn't curled up like children on purpose, but the funeral and the wake and the will reading and the unveiling had taken their toll on the three, and this was what had happened. One by one they'd dropped down onto the low bed and slept, keeping the bare world at bay with the oblivion of unconsciousness.

It's been a long time since he dreamed.

Of course, saying that is redundant, because he knows that you dream all the time, can be lost for hours in that world when, really, you've only been asleep for twenty minutes. That you only remember your dreams when they're interrupted. But still.

He wants to lie there forever.

Except that there are flies, buzzing noisily above him, cutting perfect buzzing squares through the silent air, and when she turns, he sees that he isn't the only one awake.

Her eyes zero in on his, and, later, he will tell himself that it was because she was still practically asleep that the words are burned into his memory, the strongest impression of the week of Gai-sensei's funeral that he has.

"Morning," he whispers, and she blinks, weariness still etched into her every movement, the way he expects his are, too. And then she opens her mouth, and whispers into the dusty golden gloom.

"I'm _seventeen_. Even though…"

She doesn't finish the sentence; the words have been spoken once, and the horror of them lingers, still. Rocking them, now and again, like a wave rolling through deep water. Barely noticable on the surface, but deep and manifest and filled with dread for miles below.

And in that moment, meeting her eyes over Lee's curled body, Neji wishes something unforgivable.

That she had never come into his life at all.

(_resonance_)

Word always gets around, when a great ninja dies, and he had been, if not good, certainly worthy of greatness. For a few days, it is all anyone can talk about, his death, the sordid details, the way that he went out, and she turns herself to stone to keep moving, to not throw herself to the ground and tear out her hair and die with him.

They would ask what right she had to do so.

The knowledge of this sits in her like a tumour, keeps her moving in silence, mechanically, to save herself, and him. Even in death she wants to protect him from herself. His fatal weakness, his greatest flaw. His hamartia. So it's only when his passing has become old news, eclipsed by greater, more pressing issues for the Leaf Village, only after training until her body is shaking and it is beyond her to stay standing, that Tenten sinks to the earth and cries for him. The earth of the training ground is smooth as the skin of her belly and she supposes that that's good, because elsewise she'd try to drown herself in the craters of hot earth that fill with rain and dew. And then she hears him. Lightning fast she turns, and through her grief she sees him, his eyes wide with shock, intruder on her secret misery.

She is nearly sixteen.

It is the last time she meets his eyes.

/End chapter… Cheers for reading


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** Stuff and cumquats. Happier times ahead. In future chapters, I mean ;) This one is up to the eyeballs in angst, however… Umm… yeah. I'm gonna go and clean up the earlier chapters a bit, too. They's a bit messy. Sentences have been lopped off here and there, because I just reread the whole thing and was like "wtf??" so yeah. I'll do that sometime in the next while. In the meantime…

**Disclaimer**: D'you know what I noticed? Kishimoto changes the colour of Tenten's eyes, in the anime. Twat. If _I_ owned the rights, at least the changes would be more subtle ;P

**_Vanishing Act_**

Chapter IV

_Gare de Lyon_

(_plunge_)

There are things she cannot explain about herself, mysteries from the nebula of her early years that won't, she doesn't think, ever fade. Mostly she just forgets that they're there, but occasionally they bubble up to the surface, for anyone to see, and when they sink away again, the world takes a second to right itself once more.

The first time Lee notices, they're on their way back to the village, having stopped briefly at a mixed bathing hot spring, 5 miles from the village, and she is busily dissolving into the steamy, faintly sulfurous water, eyes closed. Her buns, are soaked and dripping, while the top of her head remains dry, her aches and cuts are stinging and being soothed all at once, and it's delightfully easy to block out the sound of her teammates bickering and splashing and being boys. Which she wouldn't mind herself right now. Mostly she forgets that she's a girl at all, but then, when they do things like this, or go out to dinner, she remembers with sudden forceful clarity. Even when they're training, she sometimes catches them staring at her, and not at her face, and sometimes she wants to whack them on the head and tell them to quit it. She knows it's just hormones on their part, and that it'll pass just as soon as they can find themselves some nice civilian girls who are impressed by the whole shinobi thing, but… it's not as though it makes it any better for her, in the meantime.

She sinks a little further underwater, mouth submerged, the breath from her nose sending tiny ripples across the water, making the steam around her eddy and swirl…

Across from her, in the pool, Neji stirs, body shiny with sweat (so what if she's a hypocrite?), eyes closed, his hair gently ghosting under the water like seaweed, making both her heart hammer and a spike of envy lance through her. His hair is long, but hers is longer, and to be able to let her hair pool like water, underwater like that, like a soft dark cloud, temporarily weightless, is a luxury not worth the cold weight of it afterwards, the rivulets of icy water that will slide all the way down her back, to make her shivery all the sooner. And besides, (though she has no way to know) the boys would not-stare-at-her-face again, if she did.

And on that thought, she sighs and turns, placing her hands up on the edge of the pool, lifting herself up out of the water, meaning to dry off, slowly, in the sun, when Lee calls out her name, and she turns. (And maybe because of the way he says it – _Tenten_… - Neji opens his eyes too.) Worry etched on his beautiful bestial face, her bowl-cut teammate swims over to her.

"Tenten… what's that on your back?"

"Oh!" startled by his initial tone, relief floods her. "Just a scar." Her hand curves around to touch it, seeing with her fingers the two bruise-coloured lines that follow her spinal column, shiny and raised above the rest of her skin, even after all this time.

"But…" his eyebrows are knitted, and Neji swims over too, and, faintly, she worries about the fact that she is 14 and standing directly above them in her bathing suit, (no matter how modest it is,) but moving to cover up feels like it will only make things worse. "…Where _from_? How?"

And she understands. They know each other's bodies, as all teammates do, and he knows she's never been wounded there. She shrugs. "They've always been there. I've always had them." Trying to ignore the way he and Neji are both not staring at her face and sound nonchalant, all in one go.

But even Neji is frowning, and he climbs out of the water, presses her shoulders lightly to indicate that she should turn around, and she feels his closeness as a prickling shiver all through her body as he examines her back, and there is something like confusion or fear in his voice when he next speaks.

"But Tenten…" and she turns, hating the way they're both saying her name, even if it isn't her real one, and sees his Byakugan eyes soften back to normal, brow creased into worry lines. "There's _chakra_ in it."

(_fullsooth_)

When Gai receives the genin he is to consider, he goes to the academy, and spends an afternoon looking through their files. Hyuga Neji's is full of grudging praise and the recurring complaint that his attitude is below-par. Rock Lee's is weighty and filled with problems and triumphs that eerily mirror his own childhood, and a long time passes before Gai sets the file aside, consideringly, for the girl's.

Tenten's (no last name… odd, though not uncommon) is different again. The usual comments are _competent, works hard, of a satisfactory level_, but there, in the margin, written (almost hesitantly) in pencil, is a single underlined word. _Volatile. _In time, he comes to realise exactly what that means.

Sometimes she trains and fights with a tenacious single-mindedness that's incredible to behold, and ANBU may as well be stamped on her forehead. She calculates what she needs to do and her ferocity is extraordinary. Sometimes, there's even a glee there, when she spins her way through her dragons – not because she has to (not now that she can do so as easily as breathing) but for the sheer pleasure of it. At such times serenity wraps her, in the way Boddhisattvas at temples look, once they've made it into heaven, and her happiness is impossibly contagious.

But sometimes she's far from heaven. Tenten doesn't lose her temper, which is perhaps a relief, because like everything else to do with the teenager, it would probably be beyond her to contain it. But her apathy…

Sometimes Tenten stops playing the game. Stops heeding the rules, and sometimes it terrifies him. One day when they're out on reconaissance, looking down into a valley from a high shoulder of land, she tells him that when the wind blows in a certain way, it sounds like it's telling her to let go, to fly away, and he is petrified that she will listen.

He breaks the rules himself of course, the ones that say that he is their teacher, there to train them into being ruthlessly efficient killers and that that is as far as their relationship is meant to go, but he can't help it. He is a human, before he is a shinobi, and this has always been his greatest weakness. He can't help but want to love them, celebrate their joys and grieve their losses, be everything to them, and sometimes, it is _right_ for him to hold up their sky, and the creases at the corners of Lee's smiles, the way Neji's eyes light up in clarity are physical responses that Gai treasures. But then there are times when they trust him, and should not. Tell him things they shouldn't ever tell a soul, that scare the shit out of him. Things that he, at 31 and a living weapon, is terrified of making worse.

So when that happens, when they stand on a high ridge of land above a valley as dry and dead as the moon, and he recognises that strategies and tactics have all been blown out the window, when she is living heartbeat by heartbeat, he takes Lee's hand in one of his and Tenten's in the other, and feels Neji standing on her other side, and

"I'm never going to let go," he says, and means it.

(_current_)

The worst thing is that I understand when she says things like that – like being lost in the woods in the middle of the night is because she forgets to breathe.

I think I felt that, the first time I performed the jyuuken in one perfect, fluid sequence. When, for a second, I was struck by a memory of my father, helping me through the stances, when I was about three years old, and the sound of his laughter rattled around in my body, deep and rich, and for a second, I forgot to breathe. Didn't know if I was alive or dead.

I think that everyone has moments like that, when, for a precious few seconds, they fall out of time, and cease to exist in the real world – but that's just it. It's a… a permanent condition with Tenten, and doesn't make much sense, at that. How she forgets to breathe when she has nowhere to disappear to is one of the many mysteries that seem to flicker around her like moths around light.

And that's another. Her lightness. Sometimes there's a passion in her that defies everything I could ever begin to dream about, enough so that it even tempers the other thing in her, that I think I'm seeing more and more, the less and less she looks at me. People are taken to hospitals sometimes, for the way that she disconnects, as if there's something wrong with her. But not Tenten. She is a good actress, a better shinobi, and an innocuous teenaged girl, and these facts make her the most lethal member of our entire team.

But it _is_ just an act. Sometimes when she stares into the middle distance, just for a second, her mask cracks and there's this vulnerability to her that I don't even think she's properly aware of. Days when she gets like that (speaks to no one, removes herself from the world) the urge I feel to touch her, tell her _I'm here, Tenten. And so are you._ Is so strong that it's hard not to grab her bony wrists right then and there, and tell her so. But Gai has forbade it.

And I want to help her, and I don't know how to, and sometimes I don't know if anyone can save her at all. So I watch her, and it's as if she's blocked by hazy green trees, and all I can think is that it isn't supposed to _be_ this way…

(_definition_)

The day she finds him, she soars like a shooting star, arcing across the sky, lighting up the whole world.

They're in Wind Country, on the way to Suna, in the final permanent settlement before the desert begins for many thousands of miles, on the way home, and, for once, she feels happy. It's a sensation she isn't used to, one she wants to share, and Neji is there, because they are training and so she does. She shares it. She takes his hand in hers, laces their fingers and he turns to her, betraying no flicker of emotion in his calm silver eyes.

"I'm just… happy." She tells him, and she smiles.

It's a loaded thing, so bright and beautiful that he feels his heart ache just looking at it, burned by her brightness, and at the same time, there's a clumsy sort of fire burning in his body in response, and he is grateful for his Hyuga blood, that keeps him watermelon cool, able to stare at her and hope she can't hear his heart hammering.

"I'm glad Tenten."

It's a good training session, albeit one where they're utterly stalemated, and even though they attack and parry and _move_ almost as if they('re dancing,) had planned it in advance, her happiness makes his own face ache from grinning by the time they're warming down, when he is moving through the slower, more ancient Tai Chi Chuan he uses to calm his heart, sending chakra flowing through every part of his body at a slower, more sedate pace. Rejuvenating. She joins him, stretching out her body, once she collects all her steel again, dismissing the weapons back into her scroll, biting her thumb for some blood, to readjust the way several shuriken will fly, next time, and he averts his eyes when she does so (because that would be cheating) and when he is still, has performed the finishing move, arms settling the power within his body by sealing it off in a fluid stop, he comes over to her.

"Still happy?" Neji asks her wryly, and Tenten smiles more widely, nods once before resuming her task. It's only been two weeks since she swapped her twin dragons for a single Mother of all Dragon Scroll dragon scroll, and it's still a novelty, a movement she's yet to become familiar with. So caught up is she in her task that she doesn't see his sandalled feet by her until she hears him clear his throat.

"Tenten?" Her hair is spiling out of her buns and she shakes it a little, out of her eyes, to look up at him.

"Yeah?" She can barely see him, silhouetted as he is against the sun, and so she shrugs when he doesn't continue, and keeps going with her work.

Speech had failed him in that instant, watching her.

Training has left her cheeks flushed, the same colour as the clouds at sunset, and her skin holds some sort of luminous quality, shining like caramel. Under the sun she has become extraordinarily vibrant, as if she's a whole other person, and even her eyes…

They aren't usually that colour. He's willing to bet that he's never seen them that colour before, that deep almost-hazel colour, (like tiger's eye) in all their lives together. Staring into them (her pupils have shrunk to specks from the sun behind him, and he is prepared to bet, that she doesn't know that their eyes are locked at all) it takes him a moment to register the need to fill his lungs with air - to stay alive – at all.

The spell breaks when she shrugs, shoulders hitching, so that her shoulder blades briefly stand out against her skin, shifting her shirt across her back, like wings unfurling. And he gulps down air gratefully as he tries to remember what he'd wanted to ask her. "Are you hungry?"

She turns back to him again, voice imbued with mock seriousness for a moment. "Honestly Neji? I could well eat an ox right now… why? Do you have one?"

"What? No! I-I mean," he's stuttering. He's stuttering like _Hinata_. "I'm h…ungry too," he ploughs on, drawing out the 'H' to force his speech back to it's usual smoothness. "And so… do you…maybe… do you want to go into town? And go somewhere? For food?"

For a moment he thinks she'll refuse, but her deep eyes curve up into crescents of dark lashes, and he catches his breath again, more subtly, willing his heart to stop thumping so loudly, and she says "Sure. We're ninja, after all. Why make our risk of dying any higher by not eating? Let's go survive."

They did not know, then, the way the words would ring on through their lives, like a supernova. Dazzling their waking eyes and leaving them all the further in the darkness.

(_gravitas_)

_She is meeting my eyes. _ It's the thought he tries to keep at the forefront of his mind, that she is _looking_ at him again, but as it is, that stare – so full of fatigue and anger and disappointment and blame (and guilt) – ensures that it is only afterwards, when the feelings have been dulled by his memory that he is able to reflect on the changing ochre colour of her eyes without regret.

Back in the village now, and in training. Sixteen years old and chunin both, they still spar as they always have – in near silence, save for the sound of their heavy breathing and the sing of steel cutting the air – but nothing has been right since the night she brought tigers into their sleepy teenaged world, and they know it.

For 8 days they have done this, pretended, and Neji has begun to think that it will just become yet another warped thread in the fabric of their lives, until, under the midmorning sun, Tenten drops her scroll, cancelling the jutsu, and folds her arms.

"I'm done," she announces. "With this. Either you get over yourself or I go find Uzumaki and train with him instead."

"What are you talking about?" he demands, straightening up out of his stance (knowing exactly what she's referring to) with a scowl.

"Ever since we came back you've been acting all weird, Neji, and I can't handle it anymore. I _told_ you that it wasn't going to be pretty… it's not my _fault_ that you got creeped out." She is glaring at him, panting slightly, and her eyes are flashing golden accusations in the hazy morning world.

The cloud cover is being burned away by the sun and everything seems to be edged in milk as a result, and she is fuzzy and ironically confrontational all at once, and Neji stalks away, knowing she will follow him. "Don't you _dare_ turn your back on me!" she snarls, and grabs his shoulder, and grateful for a fight, he turns.

"That's rich coming from _you_," he snaps. "You keep everyone away and then as soon as you get a taste of your own medicine you try to get out of sleeping in the bed you, yourself, made!" Dimly he is aware that he has mucked up the colloquialism, but he is too angry to care, and she understands what he means anyway, and her eyes crackle with fury.

"Look. I didn't ask to be this way, okay? I didn't say 'Kami. Please make me a freak with no home and no life and – and – '"

"_No one_ asks! Stop acting like you're so alone and everything, because you're _not_!" And she looks at him, face scrunched up by whatever she's feeling – and he can see disgust there, and sadness, and a million other things he has no name for, and she shakes her head, as if to despair at his naivety, his lack of understanding and his next words are steeped in anger.

"Screw you, Tenten. If you do something to yourself, you do something to all of us." And the way she is looking at him, with so much pouring from those hazy eyes, makes him want…something he knows he cannot have, and it is then, shouting at her, feeling as though he is dying inside, that Neji realises something that devastates him.

That he loves her.

Because his heart is breaking in his chest.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Cheers. TBC.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:** I'm running out of things to put (_in brackets_). Can you tell? ;P Also – the bits are getting longer, so it's either that the chapters get bigger, or there are less bits per chapter… oh and HELLO NEW READERS! There are a few of ya lol ;)

**Warning: **A bit lemonish. Ish. Not smut, but just in case…

**Disclaimer:** I love MGMT. And the Kings of Leon. And the Pixies. If I could buy rights, it would be to their stuff, not Kishimoto's manga or anime or associated spin offs/merchandise.

**_Vanishing Act_**

Chapter V

_Gare de Lyon_

(_detractable_)

He wants to ask her why she is here, in his room, sitting on his bed, but he is unable to do so. When he heard the knock on the window, for a crazy moment he thought she was Gai's ghost, come to see him. But then he looked, and it was her, and opening the window, letting her in, seemed the most natural thing to do in the world. So he did. It seems like a mistake now though. He can feel her gaze on him, and, unnaturally, a blush rises to his cheeks.

It's late, and he hadn't been expecting anyone to disturb him at all, much less Tenten, (deep in her own private forest) and he'd taken his shirt off in the warming air, but with her had come the breeze, sending a draught through his room, making goosepimples rise across his body. He gets up off the bed, pulls on a shirt.

"I hope you didn't do that on my account." He ignores her, summoning the barriers he'd put up against the world that she'd always managed to get around anyway, destroyed by her kindness, her enigma. But not this time. He has had _five years_ of this now (more, if you count the academy) and _this_ (in answer to a question never posed, in a world where they have now fought and hurt and killed) is what everything has come to.

"I meant what I said," she says eventually. "And I just… I wish…"

"Wishes are fine for normal people, Tenten." He says, determined to ignore her first comment. "But we're shinobi."

"Don't teach your granny to suck eggs," she shoots back, but her pluck is low. "I don't want this. Nor do you."

He stays silent.

"Look at me," says Tenten, but he can't, has spent most of this past week unable to look at her without feeling as though her eyes were piercing right into his soul, and he shakes his head, and hears her sigh. He knows it's ridiculous that he should feel a shiver crawl up his spine at the sound, but that doesn't stop it happening.

When Tenten fights, everything is reduced to game of calculated risks, and, eventually, this knowledge is what gives him the strength to fight back.

But when he _first_ hears the pop as she undoes the buttons of her shirt, one, two, three, and hears too, the telltale rustle as she slides it off, his eyes widen. All of a sudden he is aware of the exact dimensions of his bedroom, the space between them, the closed door, the fact that he is alone in this wing of the compound. Save for her, at least. At most. At worst.

"Don't Tenten." he tries to say, but his breath is hitching, escaping from him in little silver explosions in the cold air, and the words don't help clear his muddled head.

She leans towards him, hands splayed like starfish on his duvet cover and kisses his cheek, his jaw, the point where his head and neck meet below his ear, feather light lips contrast to her body pressing into his back.

"Don't," she says in a low voice, into his ear, "Ever say that to me again."

His hands are clenched, bunched into fists with the effort it is taking him not to turn around, trigger a reaction they always warned would end badly, and he can't speak, fearing what he might say, and she takes his silence as assent. She reaches for his hand, molding his fist back to softness, and he lets her take it, because it would be churlish to refuse. Lips graze his jawline as his hand encounters the soft swell of her chest, and he gives in.

He gives in, turns into her body, pulls her to him, kisses her as if he is suffocating, as if he will die but for the way they're breathing for one another, and the way she responds, just as urgently, makes him feel _good_, and the feeling is so alien, so unfamiliar that he doesn't stop, not when she is straddling him, and his hands have strayed to the waistband of her jeans, and the need to be inside of her blocks out everything else.

Her skin is china white underneath her shirt, but for the darker circles of her nipples, exposed when he clumsily unhooks her bra, and he leans up to taste them, and Tenten closes her eyes, body on fire. She has ceased to exist, but for where he touches her, with his hands and his mouth and his hips against hers, and she has never felt more solid, more _there_ in her entire life, and so she pulls off his own shirt, too, and he lets her go for a terrifying moment to help her and his hair pools onto the bed like water when he falls back and she reaches down, unbuttons his jeans to feel the heat of him against her hand,

And then Neji goes still, opening his eyes. And she hates what she sees there.

Reality comes back in drifts, the cold air on her rarely exposed skin, the tanlines they have from training, the urgency of him between her fingers; the something she hates in his gaze. Where usually she forgets when she stares at him, this time, his eyes make her recall exactly who they are, and that awareness _stings_, as if they had ceased to be all over again.

"Tenten…" The wholeness disappears, and their part-nakedness, their burning skin, the way they've touched each other, (the fact that they're literally getting into each other's pants) seems suddenly absurd. Ridiculous.

He pulls her hand gently into his own, shifting his hips, lacing their fingers.

_What's wrong?_ she wants to ask, and tries to kiss him, tries to fathom the fact that she can _feel_ how he wants her back, and that he doesn't want to go there.

"Tenten…" he says her name again and the word is laced with hurt, cutting her to the core. "What do you want from me?"

The words hang between them like a cobweb for a moment, until she pulls her hand from his, pushes herself from between his arms, grabbing her top, pulling it on, inside-out. Angrily she takes it off again and he sits up, with a stupid look on his face as she shakes it right-side out, and he hops up but she pulls the door open, and he stalls to hide his disarray from any watching Hyuga and she turns back to him, eyes the colour of a tiger's soul, sparkling with anger.

"Something you're obviously not prepared to give." And then she is gone with his heart buffeting away in her slipstream.

When Tenten fights, everything is reduced to game of calculated risks, whether her opponents know it or not.

But not even _she_ can pull the wool over his eyes.

(_superimposition_)

After Shikamaru finds them on the bridge, Neji quickly employs one of the jutsu Gai had taught them in preparation for the chunin exams, and calls her. Seconds later and she is there, her hair still out and falling down past her waist like a wave, still bare of feet and clad in an old singlet and stripy cotton shorts because Tenten doesn't bother with buying conventional nightclothes.

"What's going on?" she says, and he is grateful that she is sharp as the steel she handles and perceptive with it, so that all he needs to say is

"It's Uchiha" for her to understand.

She looks at Lee, and then her eyes slide back to him and quietly she says;

"What have you got on you?"

"My standard kit." She looks away, reaching behind her back.

"I'll swap you. Please, Neji," taking his hand to silence his protests. "You look after your gear, I know, but mine… don't look a gifthorse in the mouth, okay?" He can feel her hand in his, the coarseness of the blisters and callouses that stripe her skin, testimony to the metal that passes so frequently through her hands. Tenten in the morning, with sleep in her eyes, giving him the only gift she can.

_Only because she said 'Please'_, thinks Neji, and nods, procures his own kit in exchange. _And it would __be __discourteous to refuse._ "Thank you." He says, and she nods in turn, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, as nonchalant as always, but when she meets his eyes again there is fear in them.

"I'll come back," he blurts out clumsily.

"Of course you will." she parries quickly. "I know. You _will_. You're strong and clever and… stuff, but…" for a second she closes her eyes, sleepy and fourteen, and then she steps forward. Reaches her arms up around his shoulders, and hugs him.

And despite the spontaneity of the gesture, and the fact that he has never been touched like that before, since his father died, he relaxes. She is soft, and smells of sleep yet to be burned off by the rising sun, and he can feel her shoulder blades, pressing against her skin like wings beneath his hands.

"Stay safe," she says, into the crook of his neck, making a shiver creep up his back. "And I know that that's a stupid thing to say, but – "

"I will."

And then there is nothing left to say.

When they make it back to Konoha, two things happen. Tenten spends more time in the hospital than she ever has in her life, (and the nurses and doctors (and Hyuga) get used to her presence, exotic skeleton leaf waiting quietly on the window sill of his private room, perched on top of the hot air vent to keep warm as the seasons change) and Sakura requests not to be put on wards during visiting hours. She knows she is being irrational, because the older girl only ever _looks_ at her, doesn't ever speak to her, but the phrase _if looks could kill_ runs through her mind, and fear rakes its claws up and down her back. She avoids the dark haired kunoichi for more than half a year.

(_nova_)

_My heart hurts_, Tenten realises, to no one in particular one fine training morning.

At the time she is not numb, but the memory of the fight that nearly killed him is fading, and the residual physical ache it has left behind is curiously disconnected from the event, so she examines it, pressing a hand unconsciously to her breastbone, and Lee (Neji, in trouble, has been taken by Gai to run with youthful vigour while they speak about Neji's "Youthful, but somewhat misdirected passions". As if knocking out a girl he'd found stalking him wasn't justified) turns from the training dummy he has nearly reduced to splinters.

"What is wrong, Tenten? Are the new weights…" he casts around for a way to say 'Too heavy', knowing full well how hard his teammate works to keep up with he and Neji. "Hard?"

She shakes her head, searching for a way to explain. It's one of those rare snatches of time, like when the sun bursts through rainclouds, when she wants to be… understood. "No, it's all good… except…"

"Except…" he prompts, and she turns to him, at a loss for words. She wrinkles up her nose, dislodging a pebble from the earth with her sandal, putting her hands in her pockets with a fluidity that makes him want to flinch.

What Lee likes about Tenten, best, is the way she moves. He is coiled like a spring, ever ready, energy bunched up and rearing to go, but she has the predatory smoothness of a born hunter, able to launch an attack from nothing in a heartbeat, and her gestures are, though he would never tell her, one of the many things he feels envious about, that his other team members have and he does not. She would probably scold him if he ever told her so though – that the grace with which she moves, like a wolf, or perhaps a tiger, is, in his eyes, on a par with the legacy Neji can sink into as easily as breathing.

He knows how much she admires Neji.

"Tenten?"

"Mmm?"

"If something is wrong you can tell me," he says, "And I _swear_ to you that I will not tell!" Fire muted in a sudden rush of consideration and awkwardness. "Unless… is it, well, _that_ time of the – "

"_No!_" she interjects hurriedly. "Lee, don't worry, it's... not, but… _please_ let's not go there."

"Alright!" he says, heartily relieved. "But then what is wrong? Are you ill?"

She shakes her head, but he can sense the words trembling on the edge of her lips like beads of water about to fall from the edge of a branch or roof, and he waits, busying himself with the strap of his sandal while she brims with whatever is eating her. They are 16 years old, and words get in the way more often than they don't.

"Lee?"

Voice carefully absent-minded, knowing she will baulk otherwise, he looks up at her briefly (delicate eyebrows knitted, hand back at the _base_ of the base of her throat) before turning back to his perfectly secure sandal. "Yeah?"

"…" While not as chatty as other girls their age – Ino or Sakura, for instance – reticence is not Tenten's natural state of affairs. Silence maybe, sometimes, but not hesitance.

"How easy do you think it is to..." again she falters, and he waits a while, but gives up.

"To what, Tenten?" he asks carefully.

"...Disappear."

(_desolate_)

The desert is cold at night, and the sand, once it loses the heat of the day, below the carpeted floor, is hard. I can't sleep in places like this, but Tenten is a different story. When she sleeps in the cold or on the earth or just generally somewhere less than comfortable, she has a look on her face sometimes, that makes you want to be wherever she is. Tonight though, she is still awake, and the awareness of our awakeness hangs between us unspoken. She's trying to wait me out, but I have the night on my side, and the harsh terrain, and the sky is bright with stars and it's getting later.

Eventually she gives up, and pulls her futon apart, standing up to lightly pick her way over the slumbering forms of Lee and Gai, slipping into the night. _Don't follow her,_ I tell myself, trying to count to ten slowly, to try and stay where I am, let sleeping tigers lie. _Eleven_. My hand doesn't so much as make the cloth whisper when I close the tent flap.

The man had spoken about Tiger Lands, and it had struck some sort of a chord in me, one it has no right to. All I know about tigers comes from a mixture of mythology and science; the forests around Konoha are empty of most wildlife, because of the roads that the poachers use, the battles that rage in the undergrowth between shinobi, riddled with humanity. Tainted. At last count (before the Sound Invasion), there were three left. In all those hectares of forest...

The tiger lands though, are another story entirely. The lands where the people are too spiritual or too few to have hidden villages, much less be players in the Secret Wars that sometimes tear the Elemental Countries apart at all. There, in the remnants of the old world, lie everything we take for granted, and Tigers fall most squarely into that category. Speaking of them in the desert, in the silky tent of a wandering man seemed to be twice-removed from their reality, and yet wholly appropriate at the same time.

Following her footsteps, standing out as pools of shadow through the sand, heading towards the light of the caravan city that has sprung up below the walls of the Sand Village, just adds to the surreality – the super-reality – of the whole thing. When I reach her she is standing beyond the circle of firelight, between two tents, stock still. And she turns back to me as if she expected me to come, and says,

"I want you to promise me something," in a whisper, and it puts me on guard. But we aren't in Konoha, lying in the summer sun, and her sudden seriousness makes me jerk my head up and down in consent.

"Don't tell Gai-sensei." And I only just manage to keep the incredulousness from my face.

When do I ever tell Gai-sensei anything? I want to say, and I'm relieved that whatever happens tonight, it's probably not even worth the effort it took to slip away.

Even if I'm going to stay.

So I nod, although it doesn't particular matter.

She's not wearing her hitai ate, and her hair is slept on (but not), and less militarily neat, and stray wisps of it brush the edges of her face, kissing her forehead, framing her cheekbones, themselves thrown into relief by the night and the firelight, and it feels like I'm treading on hallowed ground, just being by her. I don't know when she came to embody so many vainglorious things, but, in the deserted night, she's …almost sacred.

And then she takes a breath and the man, the trader from the morning is there, silent as any shinobi, and without a word the two of them begin to walk out into the desert. I follow behind and want to ask her what she is doing, but I don't know whether the man she's with knows I'm here, and I'd rather keep it that way. So I let them get ahead and only when they stop where the ground is hard and bare (I never knew, until I came here, that the desert isn't wholly made of sand), I move closer.

"There's no music," Tenten apologises, and the man takes the knife from his belt and offers it to her without a word.

**/Chapter. TBC…**


	6. Chapter 6

**Warnings for: Angst!!! A good deal of artistic licence. A lack of chronological structure.**

**_Vanishing Act_**

Chapter 6

_Gare de Lyon_

(_melancholia_)

Neji dislikes sentimentality, but if there is one thing he pulls out (in a morose, weak-willed moment) it is his photo album. A present from his cousins, upon making chunin, it features a grand sum total of 8 photographs on its black pages. His mother and father, on their wedding day, staring at each other as though they are the only two in the world. A tiny him, on his father's back, asleep. And then there are Team Gai's 5 annual team photographs. A series, like time-stop photography, in which their faces lose their baby softness, their bodies harden and tighten in on themselves, and their eyes lose their innocence until they are poles apart from their 12 year old selves, and facing a world without their sensei. They are strange to look at, and so he flicks to the final photograph quickly this time. The one that no one else knows about.

The accident, when Tenten tried to snatch the camera from whoever was aiming it at her. The shot is unfocused, framed by dark fingers, and her edges are blurred in it, a little, because she moved when it was taken, or Lee or Gai did, but, curiously, her face is perfectly focused. Caught in the crosshairs, her mouth is a halfway twirl of a nearly smile, dimples only just forming on her cheeks (like parenthesis, holding back some latent, unfulfilled emotion. Joy? Happiness? Euphoria?) and her eyes shine with a dazzling sort of straightforwardness, one she usually lacks. Even in their team photos there's a strange look in her eyes. A wariness underlying her smiles, as though she's been caught off-guard, and her instinctive reaction is to be polite.

"Orphanage courtesy," she once called it. "You try to play nice with anyone, to make yourself a little bit more secure in the world."

"Oh?"

"Not you, Neji. Not even _I_ can pull the wool over those eyes." And she'd turned to him, flicked a reassuring honey coloured gaze his way.

But it had only made him doubt.

_Those eyes…_ sometimes he wondered about that. He is an orphan, but, in some ways, Tenten is even more so. He is a Hyuga, and this means that he has history in his very blood, and the omnipresent awareness of just how deep his roots are in this land. His bloodline limit and fighting style (and even his skin and hair and bones) are the physical embodiment of this, but it is at his core that the difference between them is strongest. He fights like a Hyuga and thinks like a Hyuga and reacts like one, and he has just enough of his mother in him (Midori, the woman from beyond the pale) to be aware of it.

It is always there. That his people had lived here before the time of the Bijuu, before the village hidden in the leaves, and, because Tenten was an oh so conscientious student at the academy, he knows she knows this too, and more besides. Tenten is perceptive, is easy to talk to, is amazingly astute. Is an unknown quantity.

If Tenten resembles her people, he's never seen them. If she behaves like them, then they're probably more than a little insane. She is a person with no people, and sometimes the freedom makes him horribly jealous of her, but sometimes he thinks that continuing to breath in and out (when she does) is the bravest thing he's ever seen anyone do.

Not that he ever tells her so. While she sometimes knows what he is going to say before he says it, or understands the things he cannot put into words, there are some things which he'd rather die than for her to know.

That when they were 12, and he had sealed himself up, tight as a seashell, he fell in love with her anyway. That he has spent a good number of years trying to deny it, diminish his feelings for her to a stupid, hormone-driven crush. But it isn't. Neji has never been so sure in his entire life that anything is as not as that. It isn't just that he wants to be with her... in that way... or that she is beautiful, or the only girl he has ever enjoyed sparring with, and the only person who has ever _got_ him,

But that she has managed to change the way he breathes.

And being so tied to someone like that is something he vowed to never happen. So when he pulls out her photograph, it isn't because he has studied her face longer than he has to, or to makes his heart ache in his chest, or to try and see where that clarity disappears to, when she stands still. That would be preposterous.

He'd rather stare and recollect _exactly_ why he doesn't tell her.

(_esoteric_)

She likes to think that, one day, she will be normal. In her head, always, is an idealised person she wants to become – someone real, someone strong, someone not beholden to anyone or anything, someone powerful and in control and everything that she is not – but sometimes, when she's trained herself to the point where she can no longer see the sky because her vision has begun to warp, she feels the emptiness clawing at her edges.

But today is different.

She is nearly 17. She knows, if not _who_ she is, when she was brought into this world.

Ninety percent certain, anyway.

And for the first time in a long time, she fights it back. Beats back the feeling threatening to swallow her whole, holding onto the threads of existence that bind her to this world (the sweet evening air filling up her aching lungs, the sweat that stings and sears in the various cuts and grazes she's sustained this training session, the sound of her breathing and the trees that wave in trance-like slow motion, as if they're underwater, not overland encapsulating her in a bubble of cool green light), if only in this moment. And when she feels more solid, more tangibly _there_ (if only marginally) she puts one foot in front of the other, and leaves behind that nothingness.

And then somehow, she is at Lee's, and she doesn't know how she got here or how long she has been there, but he is cooking her "power food" and she is lying on his couch, drifting in and out of sleep, and he is letting her and acting as Lee-like as usual (which is Gai-esque, really…) at the same time and she wonders if this sort of a break from reality is what it's like to have people. For a second, she can't remember being anyone else but Tenten, the kunoichi without a last name, who fights for Konoha.

And for once, being that person isn't as scary a prospect as she has always thought.

(_spectre_)

It's the morning after, except we haven't – hadn't – didn't… go all the way.

Sucky terminology aside, I can't look at her, and I'm glad that it's mutual.

Anger is radiating from her as palpably as the vaccuum she so readily turns into, and she is resolutely avoiding me.

As much as she can when the three of us are seated in front of the Hokage, who tries to deal with us and finds the task more difficult than it probably should be, anyway. She has had her most beloved people die on her, as has Hatake Kakashi, and a thousand other souls who live in our village. Konoha is a hidden village, after all. People will always fall in the line of duty; there were will always be orphans, and every family in the village has a name carved upon the memorial stone.

But with us… it's like they're afraid to talk about it. As if our tragedy is contagious and Gai dying – the man who even the Akatsuki were wary of – has made us not invincible (far, far from it) but as a consolation prize, untouchable. Unreachable.

I remember, once, my father told me of the way that sailors who died at sea were buried by having millstones tied around their necks. We buried our sensei and hooked some part of ourselves to him, and lost that in the process...

It's meant to be our first mission briefing back together after… after what happened last time, and while we have all succumbed to psychological analysis for the things that went wrong, I know that I, at least, lied through gritted teeth about what happened, and they didn't pick up on it. I suppose the fact that we're seated here at all attests to the fact that the others did, too.

We have stopped speaking about it. Stopped doing anything together, and what Tenten and I did or didn't do last night (have sex? Make love? Sleep together?) seems like some surreal upside down dream, belonging to a world where the leaves fall upwards to the trees and girls whiten their skin in the moonlight.

I look at her, at her white, white shirt – not of the same degree of whiteness as the soft skin it covers; at her hair pinned up into strictly ridiculous panda ears to stop it from cascading down her back in smoky curls; at her calloused and scarred, honey coloured hands which traced my body and... and...

_Don't, Neji. Don't think about her ever again._

But she has haunted me through the night.

So I look at Lee instead, but I barely recognise him these days. His hair is unkempt and falling down around his face in ragged waves, and his eyes seem to burn and unfocus all at once, and there is a sort of feralness about him, as if Tenten has rubbed off on him. As if he is, for the first time, the beast that he has always proclaimed to be.

Tsunade clears her throat.

"I'm not going to pretend that this is the way I wanted you to come back into the field," she tells us, her sake glass held in one hand, skating across the broad expanse of smooth mahogany desk that separates us from her. "But times are hard."

The other two don't respond, and she watches me, as if to say "Well?" and I realise that, as the jonin among us, I'm in charge now.

"What are the details of the mission?"

She slides a manila folder across the table to me, and the relief in her eyes makes me uncomfortable, so I open it, to see myself staring at a girl with deep brown hair and hazel eyes, her skin the same creamy gold as the froth on top of a cup of coffee. I don't need to read the rest of the information to know where we're headed.

"Earth country?" I ask, and superstitiously I snatch a glimpse at Tenten as she pulls herself back into our world, catching my words, ceasing to ignore me, and I marvel briefly at the power two words can have over her.

And when I look at Tsunade, I see the way her eyes flicker away from my teammate (almost lover? Ex-best friend?) as well, before she nods.

"Earth country."

(_innate_)

When Gai finds her in the moonlight, she doesn't have time to wonder at what he is doing out at that hour himself, too caught in the shock of being pulled out of her trance as he grips her in a choke hold, his hand catching the blade of the knife, forcing it away from its line of travel, directed at her bare arms.

"What are you doing, Tenten?" And the clipped icy words wash away more of her than anything else ever could. She takes a gulping breath of air, feeling the pressure on her throat which is his arm, feeling her heart beating, suddenly jolted back into the world by six feet and one hundred and fifty pounds of angry jonin.

"It's a martial art," she begins. "It's called – "

"I know what it is," he interjects, and his voice is so low and hard and angry, burning through her back from his own body, that she shivers. "I asked what you were _doing_."

But something in the last word (and she doesn't have the time to pick it apart in that instant, no. But later, when she is bandaged and shamefully grounded for 2 days by her goddamned _teacher_, she isolates the repulsion and fear in his voice) makes her angry.

"Training," she says, and the defiance in her voice is more evident than she meant for it to be.

"Training," he repeats, but the way he says it makes her look at herself – and the training ground itself – in a new light. Through Gai's eyes, she sees the pools of blood turned black by the silvery nightlight, and she feels the cooling blood running down her body, the blood his own hands are getting slick in, and the euphoria of her training – the feeling of invincibility – is replaced by acres of shame. She relaxes against him, and he lets her go. She crosses her arms defensively and he looks at her, so hard and harsh and _furious_ that she barely recognises him.

"There is a _reason_ this is not an art practiced by Konoha shinobi. You _stupid_ girl." He – there is no other word for it – snarls, and just to reinforce the hideousness of the situation, she feels hot tears begin to roll their way down her cheeks. She hates him in that instant, more than she has hated anyone in her whole 10 years (because the time beforehand, when she wasn't in this village, when she was 4 – the time before life began – are something she doesn't – can't count).

But he, even in his anger, is merciful (loving, although she doesn't think about him as such until it is too late) to a fault, and so he relents. Pockets the claw-shaped knife, grimly pulling out a roll of bandage as he pretends not to notice her tears.

"Where did you…" he begins.

"I'll do it," she snaps, and flings out a hand (that would, in the light, be stained rosy coloured by drying blood) to take the white white fabric from him, wrapping it up around her arms quickly and deftly. She will see to the rest of her (her hips and thighs and ribs and stomach and tongue) when she is back home. And on that thought, she finds herself saying (bitterly) "It's not like I don't take care of things afterwards. I bet you haven't noticed anything untoward in training. No one has." _No one notices anything_. She nearly adds, but catches her tongue just in time.

"I'm noticing now," he returns, flatly, arms folded, drawing himself up to his full six feet and a few inches and staring at her with… betrayal(?) in his eyes. "And I'll even go one better. I _forbid_ you to touch karambit, Tenten. Ever again."

But it is how she makes her history...

"If I do..."

"I will see to it that you are suspended from active duty for the next twelve years..." And he stares at the outrage staring back at him through her eyes. "We are _shinobi_, Tenten! Do you really think anyone wants to be protected by a self-destructive ninja?****_What are you playing at?_"

It is the first time she has ever heard him yell and for a moment she tries to slip away, closing her eyes, willing herself to cease to be Tenten - _My name is Kayo and I was found in the forest_ - but when she opens her eyes she is still facing one of the most dangerous men in the world who is still looking at her with jet black eyes that snap with anger, and all she wants to do is run away from here, and only the knowledge that he will track her to the end of the world keeps her standing there.

After a moment that stretches out like an eternity, Gai sighs. "I'm going to set you to training with Kakashi a while, alright?" he says, and she wonders why, for a few days, until she realises that the reticent man with the silver hair never wears short sleeves.

She lasts 3 weeks before she visits Noboru-san – the metalworker – again. When she begins to feel transparent, inconsistent, invisible. And although she watches over her shoulder for Gai, from then on, it is out of a kind of duty. It is for _his_ peace of mind that he forbade her, and she reasons that, what he doesn't know, won't hurt him.

It never occurs to her that someone other than Gai could be watching her.

**/Chapter**

**Disclaimer: Uh uh. Yeah right. Like Tenten is ever going to get screentime and have a deep dark past ;p Escapism baby. Pure and simple ;)**

**Right. Two things: **

**a)Emo, no? :p It is what it is, dude. I'm having great fun making this drip with angst :p. At the same time, I promise it won't always be this way. Just for a while.**

**b)Anyone got any idea how to better define – chronologically – when the events in this story take place? Because I don't know, aye. And it's rather important, I suppose. Influenced by the Jefferson Airplanes and Led Zeppelin and M.I.A and To Kill a Mockingbird. **

**Cheers for reading. Tell me what you think! Oh and a big thank you to those of you who've recently put this on story alert too 3  
**


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: **Goodness. Sorry about the lack of updating. I had my university entrance exams, got a scholarship to said university, found out my dad once nearly killed me when I was a kid, was generally lazy, and am busily pulling myself out of some stupid things.

Not that I'm making excuses or anything ;)

Influences include: The Doors, Asian religious traditions and stuff like that, Ruth Padel, Richard Loseby, Gregory David Roberts, Discovery Channel and Interpol :)

_Yay for plot! :D_ at the very least ;) And it's nice and long for having taken so long. There are probably a few spellers typos but I can't be fecked running through this right now (and I have no faith in spelling checkers)

Have taken liberties and invented a random country for this chapter. Checked a map and there are heaps of unmarked blobs that can be whatever the hell I want until canon says otherwise :p Less forgivable is the messing with traditional martial arts, but whatever.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Naruto, nor do I want to. This story is for pure, unconcentrated escapism.

**_Vanishing Act_**

Chapter 7

_Gare de Lyon_

(_non-perishable_)

_Let's go survive._

She looks lovely in this light, he thinks, and, self-consciously runs his fingers through his hair.

Tenten of the golden eyes with the curly smile. It's something he's only recently been able to recognise – that when Tenten is genuinely, bona fide _happy_, her mouth curls up, revealing dimples in her cheeks and wrinkles around her eyes. Just so is she smiling, now, going into the village with _him_, and not to train, or be shinobi, but to… just eat.

The something that stirs and flickers in his chest and at the edges of his consciousness when she is there makes him feel _good_, and as they walk over a rise in the ground towards the village, when she takes his hand over the broken ground, the feeling intensifies, and he wonders at how something as mundane as getting food can be so enjoyable.

The mud-packed walls of the village are splashed blue, and he recalls a story of blue being a colour used to ward off evil, and he wonders, smirking, just what these people have to fear. In the middle of nowhere, on the edge of the desert, what do they need protecting from?

"Happy, huh?" she says, and he realises she's been watching him.

"Well," he says stoically. "I suppose you're just infectious." Good-naturedly she punches his shoulder and he punches hers back, and then his stomach growls horribly loudly.

"Jeez Neji. Can you be a little louder? I don't think they quite heard you in the Land of Waves…"

"Very funny," he says dryly, hoping to god he doesn't blush, and she grins and says "Why don't you find us something to drink and I'll get food, yeah? Meet back here? Say, in 15 minutes?"

Nodding, he watches her melt away into the crowd, and when she is gone he turns and searches for a man selling sweet hot apple tea, and then he makes his way back to the street corner where they'd split up, and waits for her to return.

When the first stars begin to peek through the deep indigo sky, when he is the only one left on the street at all and the tea has long since gone cold, he makes his way back to camp.

She doesn't come back until dawn the next day, and he knows this because she crawls over to him in the tent and reaches forward to shake him awake.

"I'm awake," he says, eyes still closed, before she touches him and he feels her start back slightly, the gloom of his closed eyes alleviated to a redder colour as the space between them lets in the sun's rays.

Lee and Gai have already gone off to train, and they are the only two there and he opens his eyes, sits back so that they are facing each other, as she looks at him with guilt in her eyes, framed by the sun.

"About last night…"

"Don't worry about it." He says, light-hearted but cold. "I don't care." And the lie slides from his mouth as easily as warm honey.

And her hair is turning to that particular golden colour, and rosy, too, around her edges, the skin of her bare arms lit up, eyes glittering in a way he refuses to recognise.

"But I – "

"I don't want to hear, Tenten. What you do in your free-time really doesn't affect me. We're shinobi, right? And our lives and our _selves_ are _always_ separate."

The sun is rising in the desert and she has screwed him over. She nods, and he watches her eyes – still open – kind of close.

"Okay…" she whispers.

He pulls on his shirt and leaves her there before running into the desert until his lungs are aching and his bruised heart has no choice but to thrum in his body.

(_salve_)

He hadn't left her for long, but any point of time with man-eaters loose, is a bad time to leave a child alone, and when he returns with a mango, she is lying there, as still as stone, face down in her own blood.

He drops the fruit and rushes over to her. "No. God no. Don't do this to me. Please. No. Not her. Not her…" and he doesn't know whether he is speaking aloud or inside of himself, but he guesses in his head because when he gathers her up in his arms and says "Wake up Kayo. Wake _up_!" the smell of blood forces its way up his nostrils and he wants to be sick. Not because it's blood - because he is, after all, a shinobi, and first killed when he was 2 years older than she is now - but because it is _hers_, and she is meant to smell of leaf mould and sunlight, not… not…

He scrambles a few meters away from her and vomits up the sweet fruit he'd only eaten twenty minutes ago and he is 9 years old and trying-not-to-cry and he ran away before he ever learnt more than basic first aid and she is dying in his arms with her eyes all glazed over to the hazey colour of the sky in the polluted cities, and she has lost far, far too much blood, and all he can think to do is to… is to _force_ the wounds to close.

He pulls her onto her side, gently, gently, and her clothes are in tatters, and when he feels a sob force its way out of his mouth, when he sees what has happened to her back and realises what would have happened, pieces together the bite marks and the craters in the earth, he realises that he has no choice but to try to save her. Because she is his soul. Because _he_ is the one who left her out here when a tiger came calling, and she is all he has.

So he takes the earth from the ground at her feet, because he is _quite sure_ that it will help staunch the flow of ferrous blood, and when it is hot in his hands, chakra laced and odd-feeling, he gently presses it onto the wounds in her back, and prays.

He falls asleep with his hands there, and when he wakes up 2 days later (or so she tells him) weaker than an overcooked noodle and she shows him her back, the wounds are already nearly closed.

_Magic_… he thinks, awed, and finds the fact that his chakra is a part of her to be the most incredible thing in the universe. Kayo-chan with chakra-shaped clay in her back. Marked out by the tigers but cleansed by the earth and his very own lifeforce.

Gloriously alive.

(_deliverance_)

Naruto does _not_ strike the killing blow when he is betrayed, merely knocks his chunin instructor unconscious, and gives him a beating that would have been more savage had the boy not impeded his offence with the number of shadow clones he created to take down the older man.

Instead, in custody, Mizuki lingers in a dungeon, recovering from the beating that Ibiki's cronies have wreaked on his body, chained to a wall, feeling the blood drip down the back of his throat from somewhere inside of him that hasn't stopped in three days.

But even so, in the midst of his pain and helplessness, he finds a way out, an escape from this, the world he had wanted to leave forever. A bolt-hole where they cannot touch him.

_Tenten_.

She is his mantra, his bright spark, and he wonders if she will ever understand why he named her that.

For the sky.

He had been a refugee, during the Iwa-Konoha war, brought in from a people who lived as close as they could to the sky, in the mountains, where the air was thin and prayer flags fluttered on the breeze, in a place where you had no choice but to believe in something, for the wonder of the world spread out beneath your feet.

The sky was the most sacred, precious thing he could give her. The _only_ thing he could give to the child who had stared up at him with the setting sun shining from her eyes.

_Tenten_, because he had loved her so much that he had named her for the thing he had treasured, most in the world. It was the one allowance Konohagakure no Sato had made him when he carried her back that day, (ten whole years ago…)

Kneeling, bound, in the dungeon (and his execution is a mercifully closed affair, due to the near-success of his treason, so that the greater public won't get any ideas), with loathsome Sarutobi staring at him beyond the glitter of the executioner's sword, Mizuki closes the eyes which are already nearly swollen shut from the black-ops beating.

"What do you fear, Mizuki?" says the Sandaime Hokage, but Mizuki isn't into playing these little psychological games, so instead, he thinks of the sky.

_Tenten_… he wants to say, wants to be able to see her face a final time, wishes to god that he had won that long-ago custody battle (but orphans belong to the state. No exceptions). _Blue is the colour of heaven. _

_(And let me marvel at it all)  
_

Not a heroic way out, by seppuku, though he wouldn't have chosen that path anyway. Instead, there are two porcelain-masked jonin standing above him, katanas at the ready.

_But amber will save you in this world. _

It is over instantaneously, and then his body is burned, ashes scattered to the four winds.

(_slipping_)

Although Tenten _works_, harder than any of the other kunoichi her age, harder than Neji (though not Lee, perhaps,) she still finds her days stretching out like they're made of glue sometimes, and so, because she has never cared for television, and knows (mostly) when to give in to the fatigue of her body, she reads at night.

And because Tenten is alone and there is no one to ask about books or genre or blurbs or tastes, she trips into the library at the Hokage Tower and it is there that she finds the scroll on Pencak Silat one day. It is written by the First, an account of the customs and cultures of other people in the Elemental Countries, during the time he spent on diplomatic trips to meet with the other Kage and Daimyo of the lands of the EC and the sentence that captures her imagination is at the very bottom of a paragraph concerning the Land of Shining Light, (an island kingdom in the Eastern Ocean), added on as an afterthought. And Tenten, thirteen years old, and strung between a natural born genius and a genius of hard work, stops. Reads it again.

_The disciples of this martial art call upon the spirit of their tiger gods to endow them with power._

She is only thirteen, but she thinks she understands power. Not merely strength, (which she doesn't have in spades anyway) and not merely control. Energy, focused by intention. Not the razor sharp edge of her weapon nor it's shape or form. The way it has been _forged_, steel folded and refolded over and over to make sure it will never, ever break.

And so she does a bit of reasearch, and she tells the chunin librarian that her sensei has asked her to research Karambit for an upcoming mission (and he doesn't look past her curling brown lashes, her creamy skin and innocent plump cheeks) and she visits the blacksmith who usually tends to her weapons, and request a very specific kind of knife. During the day (with the technique that Gai provides for her, because even if she can't move as quickly as Neji and Lee she can jump higher and longer than both of them) she throws herself into training and hugs her growing prowess with the tiger-claw dagger close, admiring it as a secret to show the others one day, when she can wow them.

She doesn't think about the scars at first. It is the fact that she can bleed and not hurt which is astounding to her, proven one mission when she falls and breaks her wrist but continues to fight. _It is power_, she thinks as Neji gently holds her wrist in his hand, cool blue chakra prickling down into her skin, knitting bones back together as he remonstrates with her for letting herself do this. _To continue, disregarding pain completely. _

"I mean… what the hell were you thinking?" he demands, and she looks at him, shrugs, looks away again.

_And it is mine._

It isn't that she is greedy, or gluttonous, because she isn't. Not for glory or wealth or fame, not for blood or skill or recognition, but… she's the only person she knows who has had time itself stolen off of her.

And having such control of her body, of the one thing that is hers, beyond any shadow of a doubt, makes it feel like she is gaining it back.

Giving the universe in general a hearty "fuck you" at the very least.

(_veritas_)

The truth is a shiny thing, and this is perhaps why people are so reluctant to look at it, in the light of day.

They are 12 years old, and the training grounds are cold and Tenten is feeling shinier than usual, and, heads together, she and Lee and Neji watch the way the the light shafts down on them through the leaves in splinters, the brightness of the sun rendered managable by the cool green leaves, and she reaches her hands up to brush the the golden beams and says "Truth?" to no one in particular.

"Aren't we meant to play with Dares as well Tenten? I do not understand!" says Lee, put out.

"Well, yes," she says, adolescent limbs heavy with exhaustion. "But I figured… do you _really _have enough energy left to be all daring right now?"

"Of course I do!" he shouts, the flames of youth flickering through his voice. "If I do not complete the dare then I – "

"Have to 'Truth'." Neji interjects, rolling onto his side. "This is a stupid game."

For a moment the silence is thick, but after a pause, Tenten sits up. "Okay then, Neji. I _dare_ you to play."

"That's a stupid thing to say." Tenten watches the leaves eddying down from the autumn trees to wash away the bitter waspy sting of his current mood, and when she next speaks, her voice is serpentine hard. "But Neji, if you don't, then won't it be your fate to fail at absolutely everything forever and ever?"

"Don't be ridiculous." He says, but there is a barb in his voice and she is both angry-glad and distressed at having gotten under his skin. They are newly minted genin, and at the academy, he was always this… boy the other girls mooned over, who removed himself from any and all social situations, and she has kind of been dying to have a go at him for years, and now, when he's being such a twat (and Gai isn't there to see) she lets go.

"Well, logically," voice laced with affected confusion. "If you quit now, aren't you a quitter forever? Isn't that what you always say?"

"Don't try to get under my skin, it won't work," he says, and the condescension in his voice makes her sit up.

"Okay then, _Hyuga-kun_," she says, throwing as much disgust into the name – commonly spoken with tones of utter adoration back at the academy by the stupider girls – as she can. "I suppose I'd better tell Gai that you'd better go back to the academy, because even though you passed the test, you can't play a game of truth or dare, and this means that, well, you're going to fail at li – "

"You're just a stupid little girl," He spits out. "You have _NO IDEA_ what my life is like. How _dare_ you judge me."

After his outburst, breathing heavily, while the silence continues to fall down from the golden afternoon trees, Neji registers that Tenten has gone, as silently and stealthily as any shinobi, and he turns to meet only Lee's accusatory eyes.

"We weren't even playing properly," he says, and Lee says nothing, stares at him.

All his life, people (teachers, his friends at the academy, strangers) have told him that his eyes, (opaque as milk, pearly as the delicate inside of a seashell) are disconcerting, but only for the way they look, not for what they hold. Lee's eyes are deep and dark and the most disconcerting thing he's ever been forced to meet.

Hours later, he realises that it was his own self reflected in those sloe black eyes.

It is late now, past midnight, but in a hidden village the streets are never quiet, however much they appear to be to the dozy civilian population. But Neji is a Hyuga, and with his Byakugan activated there is very little he can't see. And she is there, and he isn't surprised, and even though he has come here just for that girl in the moonlight, he is reluctant about doing this. Not because he doesn't want to apologise, but because he has no prior experience doing so.

And so he watches her, throwing flickers of steel so small and fast that were it not for his technique he wouldn't be able to follow them.

"I know you're there," she says after a while, stalking over to the target she's been aiming at to pull out a handful of knives, and Neji briefly imagines where on a person's body they would have struck, the way Gai has taught them to, and sees she is aiming for the nerve ends and pressure points that cause pain and paralysis and cripple even the strongest warriors. He moves out into the moonlight and there she is, only 12 years old and the same height as he is – both short at this stage, although if he is anything like his father (and people tell him so all the time) he will grow into a giant one day.

He isn't sure about her, though. Beyond the academy, he doesn't really know that much about Tenten at all… and can barely remember her there to begin with.

They stare at each other for a long time, and he isn't sure why there's so much tension in the night-time air, but it's there, filling up all the space between them so that he finds he just can't say the words he's been rehearsing in his head for so long.

So instead of apologising, he settles into his stance, his eyes flickering into the technique which is the one thing he treasures, and she pulls out her three kunai, and that night, they spar until the trees stand out against the sky again, and they know that dawn is close.

Exhausted, pumping with adrenaline, they lie down in the unevenly shaped crater that his almost-perfected technique has wrought on the training ground, as they did the afternoon that feels so terribly long ago, and into the dawning un-darkness, Tenten says, quietly, "Truth, Neji? I'm… sorry for what I said," her breathing ragged and heavy and reminding him of just how alive he is.

"I was being a jerk… truthfully," he replies, adding the last word on with a wry grin-grimace that she, in the dark, can't see. But he feels her reach out and take his hand in hers, and knows he is forgiven.

"I didn't mean it," she murmurs, and for some reason, the tightness in her voice matches the tightness in his chest. "You make me…" She falls silent, casting around for the right word, while his mind supplies random (insane) ones into her silence.

_Angry? Happy? Sad?_

…

_Love?_

She rolls her eyes, a grin playing at the edges of her mouth, and the sun is rising now, and he can see the expression without his clan technique. "Believe, I guess," says Tenten.

And for those words, Neji stops disappearing as soon as training and missions are over. And resolves to know her until the day he dies.

**End Chapter…**

**Cheers for reading**

**Happy New Year**


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